It’s like one of those fill-in-the-blank name games, where you find, say, your hipster pop-up restaurant name by taking the way you’d least like to die followed by the meat you’d like to try least. Except in this case, you take a celebrity you hate, and then search their social media for the most offensive words you can think of.

Last week we saw YouTuber Jack Maynard leave I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! after the Sun published tweets from 2011 to 2013 in which he’d used the words “niggas” and “retarded”, Zoella (the beauty vlogger who earns £50,000 a month) apologised for mocking “fat chavs” in 2010 and grime star Stormzy apologised for tweets sent between 2011 and 2014 which contained the word “faggot”. The week before, the newly hired (now newly fired) editor of the Gay TimesJosh Rivers had been found directing hate towards, among others, transgender people, Jews, Asians, Africans, and the homeless in tweets sent between 2010 and 2015.

We forget so fast, the words we were immune to in our youth

Except while the headlines are similar and the words are foul, the stories are difficult to compare. To do so properly would require spreadsheets that collate not only the age of the tweeter at the time of tweeting, and the frequency, focus and weight of the abuse tweeted, but the person’s professional status in relationship to the politics of abuse, too. Rivers, for instance, could no longer be taken seriously as a promoter of LGBTQ rights when people had read his historical thoughts on how “The creepiest gay men are short, old Asian men with long nails.” And it would have seemed unwise, wouldn’t it, to have kept Labour MP Jared O’Mara as a member of the women and equalities committee after the public saw the homophobic and misogynistic comments he’d posted online between 2002 and 2004.

But had these men not been pursuing jobs in the equalities industry, would they still have deserved to have their horrible histories stapled up on the internet like this, for everybody to spit at? These hate-dives into decade-old transgressions are sold to us as a modern necessity, as if conmen have been defrauding the British public behind masks of decency and, in the spirit of progress and transparency and all that, they must be exposed.

On one hand I think shitty language is a good indicator of the true bigotry of a person – when John Galliano said he’d only used antisemitic words because he’s an alcoholic, well, like vomit on a night bus, drunkenness only allows you to boke up what you’ve already digested inside. But on the other, the context of shitty language is important. “The homophobic language I used was, embarrassingly, a part of my vocabulary when I was younger,” tweeted Stormzy. I can’t help but wonder about the direction of these shamings, too. Why choose Stormzy? Why type his name into that little search box, over any of his white contemporaries? There’s a pointedness to this news-gathering. These are celebrities that the Sun thinks need bringing down a peg or six. We forget so fast, the words we were immune to in our youth.

In 2006, the BBC backed Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles when he said he’d used the word “gay” to describe something as “rubbish”. Matt Lucas looks back awkwardly at the characters – including a transvestite who said, “I’m a lady” – he played on Little Britain, 15 years ago. “Society has moved on a lot since then… Now I think it’s lazy for white people to get a laugh just by playing black characters.” Which is easy to snort at, to reply: “You reckon?” But it bears repeating, if only because it makes white audiences question whether we are really simply disgusted at those shamed, or disgusted at ourselves for our complicity.

People have been saying stupid and offensive things forever, and to look back on these comments from the distance of decades is uncomfortable, in part because the public has learned the implication of homophobic language, of abusive words. These new exhumations of old internet graves have occasional use in weeding out those perhaps unsuited to a career in “equalities”. But like a mirrored lift, where a thousand yous stretch out for miles, more often their only value is in showing a reflection of our own sticky pasts.